Three ways home energy assessments can improve your contracting business
Posted on Mon, Apr 04, 2011 @ 07:27 AM
If you are an independent contractor looking to grow your business, you may want to support the national Weatherization movement. Here are three ways to increase the money in your pocket, and do some good:
1) Performing weatherization audits is good business.
There are more than 38.6 million households are eligible for Weatherization services*. These are homes that need to be assessed and then retrofitted to improve their energy efficiency.
Did you know that the average energy audit can save the typical low-income home 35% in energy costs per year?* That’s a big incentive for families to get an audit completed!
Using a specialized Energy Auditing tool, like HEAT can make an energy assessment a straight-forward, repeatable service for you to perform on all types of homes. The HEAT tool walks auditors through all of the stages of the expert energy audit, and enables them identify the best measures for weatherizing the home. Auditors can also select the appropriate weatherization measures to implement for the homeowner during the audit from an iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch, or through a browser connected to our hosted service!
Auditors can immediately show the consumers what measures will save them the most money, how much it will cost to implement, and what their payback will be.
2) Implementing the recommended weatherization measures is an even better business.
Once an audit has identified the measures (aka lights retrofitting, insulation, shell repairs, etc) that will best weatherize a home, you can provide a quote to the homeowner to implement those measures. That’s right. Someone has to implement the changes to the home, and it could be you!
Performing energy audits, and then performing the weatherization measures can be a great way to grow your contracting business.
Hancock has a tool to walk you through the entire weatherization process, including implementing and inspecting the implemented weatherization measures. By using WAP Online with HEAT, you can preselect and order the materials needed for each weatherization job, and manage the job from installation through inspection. The solution is seamless, and used by 9 states and 200 agencies, refined to perfect the weatherization management process.
3) Weatherizing homes will reduce the amount you pay in taxes to heat homes.
Performing weatherization services for low-income homes will not only will you grow your business through an increase in clients and services, you will reduce your tax-payer burden on heating low-income homes.
For every $1 invested in the program, Weatherization returns $2.51 to the household and society.*
- $1.80 is returned in reduced energy bills*
- $ 0.71 is returned to ratepayers, households, and communities.*
If those three reasons are not enough to entice you, then think about this:
You will breathe easier. When done correctly, simple weatherization retrofits on a single home reduces residential and power plant emissions of carbon dioxide by 2.65 metric ton/year –PER HOME. Over the life of the measures, saves 53 metric tons of CO2 emissions per house.*
Weatherization is good business, and Hancock is here to help. Take the HEAT software for a test drive, and expand your business today.
* Sources: ORNL/TM-2010/66, EIA February 2010 Short Term Energy Outlook